In Hesiod’s Greek myth of Pandora, the container she opened was a jar.
The earliest surviving literary accounts do not describe a box in the modern sense. Hesiod’s Works and Days uses the Greek word pithos, a large storage jar, for the vessel associated with Pandora. Such jars were used in the ancient Greek world to store commodities including grain, oil, or wine.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” arose later through a translation history. In the sixteenth century, the humanist Erasmus translated pithos into the Latin pyxis, meaning a small box or container. That choice helped establish the wording now used in English and many other languages.
The jar-versus-box distinction is one of the best-known details of the story. The narrative’s central idea is unchanged: once the container is opened, destructive forces escape, while hope remains inside.